Life Will Lay You Down (as the lightning has lately done)
by FigureofDismay
Summary: An intense exploration of love and loss and obsession and Liz's psyche, centering around the events of the Garrick incursion and thereafter. Red/Liz pairing. AU semi-canon compliant. At times it seemed as though her life moved according to certain prohibitions on looking, as though she were in some strange and senseless fairytale. It started with the boxes, it unraveled from there.
1. what you anointed in pointing your gun

**Author's Note: **this is the first part of (I'm guessing) 3 or 4 parts in this story. I've had some of these ideas floating around in my head for a while, and I wanted to revive an old style of mine, which is completely different than that in **Decline and Fall** (which I am still working on I promise). I'm already working on the rest of this story. I hope to have the next chapter up within a week or so.

This fic is AU but semi-canon compliant, and will have spoilers for 1.09/1.10 Anslo Garrick onward, in time. This fic includes and focuses on Red/Liz pairing, and expect it to be more evident here than in my other story!

None of the characters you recognize are mine, nor is the Blacklist world. No infringement intended. Written purely for entertainment purposes.

* * *

_are you mine?_

_my heart?_

_mine anymore?_

_stay with me for awhile,_

_that's an awfully real gun._

_I know life will lay you down,_

_as the lightning has lately done._

_failing this, failing this_

_follow me, my sweetest friend,_

_to see what you anointed in pointing your gun there._

_- Only Skin, Joanna Newsom_

* * *

There were boxes. There were a lot of boxes. It started because Tom told her he needed the boxes out of the living room because the parent group from the class play was going to be coming over that friday night. She hadn't touched them since they arrived by truck as packed up and sent by her Aunt Judy, but she hadn't forgotten about them, or what they represented - an impossible project, and terrible loss, a reality she didn't want to face. She'd begun to feel like the boxes were lying in wait.

First she moved them, one at a time, up the stairs to the room that had once been her office, and then partially made over into a nursery before that too had been dismantled. She stacked up the boxes into a maze between the door and her abandoned desk. She meant to leave them like that, dead and contained in the room at the end of the hall, where they couldn't assail her with pangs of loss, and obligation.

Red had been away for two weeks. He had called her once, on a staticy line and she had clutched at her phone and leaned into his voice, straining for every nuance, half sure the line was being tapped, half sure he was saying goodbye to her, that he had made the mistake of nearly sacrificing himself for her once and meant never to see her again.

"Where are you," she shot at him, rapid fire and alarmingly shrill, "Are you hurt? Are you safe? They're looking for you, I need to know what to tell them." She meant, don't you know how desperate I was to find you, don't you know how hard I tried?

"Tell them the truth, Lizzy," he told her, sounding distant and tired and strained, "I'm going to be away, for a while. You will be protected, you will be cared for, I want you to know that, and if you need me, I will find a way to you, but I won't be able to… be here for a time, do you understand?"

"No, Red, I don't understand, Garrick's dead, there's going to be an investigation, we'll find the mole - it'll all be cleared up soon, you'll see."

"I need you to be careful of your husband, I know you don't believe me, but you owe me that much, at least," he told her, ignoring her protests, "Keep a weather eye. I'll contact you again when the way is clear."

"Wait," she had called, feeling a desperation like somewhere a clock was ticking down, "How do i contact you if I need to get you a message?" _How do i know you won't just disappear off the face of the earth?_

"I believe you know the avenues open to you," he'd said, and the line had gone quiet then, but he hadn't hung up, they just listened to each other breathe for a long stretch of seconds until finally he'd said, "You'll be alright, Lizzy. After all I did a much better job keeping you safe from afar than I have from close by."

And she hadn't been able to form a response that encompassed the fact that he had kept her safe in the most ludicrously reckless way, and that she'd kept herself safe all these years, he could hardly take the credit and her outrage that he was vanishing just as suddenly and violently as he'd arrived - and the line had gone dead.

She'd kept the phone in her pocket the rest of the day, curling her fingers around it from time to time. And when Tom had tried to talk to her again about moving, she had shouted at him, wildly and incoherently, but thankfully briefly. She retreated to a scalding, scented bath, with a firmly locked door between her and the rest of the world, where she sat curled over her knees in the hot water, trying to figure out how to breath against the vice around her ribs, pressing her hands over and over again to her dry eyes.

* * *

Tom didn't let the idea of moving go. She'd go into work have to give statements, and be interviewed while hooked up to a polygraph, talk about Red, and the incursion, and the ambulance ride from hell, and then she'd go home and Tom would start talking about how dangerous her job was to both of them, how much stress she was under, if they just moved away everything would get back to normal. First he fixed on Nebraska, until she snapped at him.

"Don't you know how hard I worked to get away from the little town where I grew up?" she responded at last, out of patience, the third night of the inquest.

"What about New York, then? We were happy there, right?" he'd said, mulish and oblivious to her resolve.

Were they, she wondered, somehow she couldn't remember that at all.

* * *

"I'm not moving, Tom," she told him, when he still hadn't given up by the end of the week, "My life is here, my job is here. I've made commitments. I've got a career."

"What about us? What about our life, together - I thought you wanted a family, how is that supposed to work when you're getting yourself nearly killed every other week?" he'd demanded in return and there was a awful note in his voice, a whine like she was being so unreasonable and he was being so patient for putting up with her.

"My father died a month ago. My job has turned into trying to catch the worst possible monsters you can imagine, and I'm sorry but that is more important right now. I just don't have any room right now for new life, I don't have it in me. I'm sorry, Tom, but I can't move and I certainly can't see how we bring a child into this, not now, not how things are," she'd said with a grave surety she didn't often show him, and was surprised to realize that all of these things were true. That she meant them. That she couldn't hope for family, now that the world around her had turned hard and unsteady and alien.

He'd taken it better than he might have, she supposed. He'd walked out of the house without a word and slipped back in a couple hours later, smelling of cold, damp outside air and cigarettes rather than alcohol, the way some men might, and stalked upstairs to their bedroom, closing the door with a quiet but definite snap. She stayed downstairs pretending to work on case notes until she fell asleep in her chair.

A chilly silence settled into her house, between them then. Tom sulked and pretended that he wasn't sulking, either that or suddenly he didn't care at all. Liz found she was was avoiding looking at him, glancing at his profile, over his shoulder, ignoring the pinched look on her husband's face, the way he didn't talk about school at all, or try and cajole her into understanding, or offer to cook anymore. Not that she was ever home in time for dinner.

Eventually she was considered fully debriefed by her superiors, and she had finally managed to convince them that she had no earthly idea where Red might be, because as usual he hadn't really told her anything. She was sent home at the end of the week and told not come back for a while.

Compassionate leave they called it, because she'd only taken three days off between cases to go to her father's funeral. She was pretty sure it was 'we don't know what to do with you when Reddington's not here' leave. She tried not to take it personally, it was true she could use the break. It was just that what waited for her at home was a thick, suffocating tension that she couldn't seem to figure out how to fix or abate in way.

* * *

The first day off, she went to visit Ressler in the hospital, finally. She hadn't seen him since Garrick's men had led her away from the Box at gunpoint. She'd been at work far past visiting hours every day since then. It was surreal, seeing him that way, stranded in a hospital bed, his face pale and pinched with pain. She hovered by the doorway, unsure of her welcome, but he seemed happy enough to see her, which was a rarity in an of itself. She managed to perch awkwardly on the edge of the visitor's chair, realizing that she was there at least partly because she was working her way around to apologizing for Red pointing a gun at him to make him give up the code and spare her. She wasn't going to, though. It was nothing she had asked for, nothing he did deserved her guilt, and she had no allegiance to him that she should apologize in his stead.

"Glad to see you got out of it okay, Keen," he said, "Meera came to visit a couple days ago, she, ah, summarized what happened."

"She took your statement already?" She wasn't surprised, Agent Malik was very good at her job.

"Yep. Don't know if it will help you guys, they were giving me something top notch in my drip," he smiled broadly and lifted the hand that was still hooked up to an IV. Still on some pretty good stuff, she guessed, he didn't usually joke with her.

She tried for small talk for a while until it came down to what they both seemed to really wanted to talk about.

"Have you heard from Reddington," he asked at last, obviously expecting that she had.

"He called me that night, after…" she shrugged, she'd already told the investigation all about it, they'd made her go over and over it, so she was long past the tender feeling of divulging what felt personal, "He didn't tell me anything except that he would be away. I think he only called so I - so we wouldn't think he was dead in a ditch somewhere. No clues, nothing, the number he called from was a payphone."

"Meera said you were pretty determined to find Reddington, after you got away," he said, speculative, like he was prodding for a deeper answer, "That was quick thinking, by the way."

She nodded noncommittally, unwilling to clarify if she was admitting to the fervency of her search or assenting to his praise. She didn't owe Ressler explanations about that, after all he'd chased the man for five years. He must have scrambled just as hard at times, he must have taken it personally sometimes too.

"What did you talk about?" she found herself asking, and yes, this was probably why she'd come, "You were trapped together for a long time." And he likes to talk, she meant, he always talks at the worst possible moment, until you wanted to snap.

"It's kind of a blur to be honest. I lost a lot of blood. He said something about saving the person that's in front of you. He said something about sailing. He was Reddington, you know. Weird, reckless, not very sane. Surprisingly human."

Sailing, she thought, I'll look into that. Maybe he was somewhere by the sea.

"Don't do what I did, Keen," he told her suddenly, recognizing the hungry look in her face, "Don't throw your life away on this quest. If he's gone, don't keep chasing until you're gone too."

"I'm not," she said, "I won't. I'm on leave anyway."

What life, she thought, i think it's already gone.

* * *

She couldn't sleep next to Tom, his huffing sleep breaths that had always gotten on her nerves, his new, distant, watchfulness, not even with a wide margin of bed between them. She tried, for a while, to drift off, holdinging herself as close to the edge of the mattress as she could. Tom had snapped at her for that the other night, that he wasn't going to put a finger on her if she felt like that about it, that he wasn't a monster, for god's sake.

She gave up. She went instead to the room with the boxes.

* * *

Some things Judy had kept, things from their shared childhood. Some things, from her own childhood, she already stored, in the attic, in the basement, in the back of her closet. When she and Tom had been so excited about starting the process to adopt, she gone home for a time, to visit her dad, talk to him about what it was like raising her. She had wanted more of the things from when she was a little girl near by, in preparation, in hopes that she might share her early books and surviving toys with her own child.

Mostly they were full of books, and papers. Photo albums. A stunningly huge number of case files, the archives of the whole PI business, it seemed. She wondered why Vic hadn't taken any of it. Maybe he didn't care. Maybe he didn't have room. He'd retired years back and moved out into the woods somewhere in Oregon, where he had family. He sent her postcards sometimes, with pictures of mountains on them.

Of course, she realized some time in high school that it wasn't just a PI firm, or wasn't only one. She'd never told anyone about that, not even Malcolm, years ago, or Tom. Somehow Red knew though. Somehow Red knew everything, he was omniscient that way, inexorable. He'd been everywhere, all the time, and she hadn't even noticed.

In one carton, on top of a whole lot of old home made cassette tapes, was a stacks of her dad's notebooks, the ones that cops and reporters use, bundled together with big rubber bands. It all smelled old and dusty, faintly of damp, from the basement of the old house. She lifted out one of the bundles and unbound it. She couldn't even track what was written inside the first notebook, she couldn't see past the shock, horrible and wonderful and familiar, or seeing her father's handwriting again.

In another, on top of a stack of photo albums, was a long metal box, like a small toolbox, with chipped enamel and a little lock. It took her a moment to remember that her father's keys were now sitting in a little dish of knick-knacks and change on the hall table downstairs. She got them and brought them back, and tried the unidentified tiny yale key on the set in the lock. The thing opened with an easy twist. Inside was jumble of more papers, more pictures, more odds and ends from the business, a passport, and a tiny green matchbox car she almost remembered giving him from her set of them. She remembered playing with them at his desk at the office after he picked her up from school, suddenly and completely remembered, how it felt to be little and sitting on her father's lap and driving her tiny brightly coloured cars over up and over the obstacles of his stapler and rolodex. She put a finger on little green metal roof. Then she reached under the toy to excavated the stack of photos.

* * *

When Red first showed up in her life, really showed up, when her first day at a new job started with a helicopter ride, he'd made some comments indicating he knew her family. She could never figure out if he meant he knew Sam or he knew her biological family.

After the day in Wujing's underground bunker, where Red had coldly shot a man just to protect her identity, he had sat beside her in the back of that plush car. He had looked at her with such intensity, with such knowingness. He warned her that the answers were far from simple, the look on his face telling her that she should expect them to hurt, when she found them.

He told her that he would do anything to keep her alive. Alive, he'd said, not safe, not as though he cared, but as though she was valuable. It chilled to think of, she couldn't fathom what her value might be to a man like Red, and that was the first piece that fell away, the first crack as the ground began to fall away underfoot.

And yet, that's how it always began of course, and yet. He wouldn't stay in the neatly partitioned place marked Dangerous Criminal, he defied classification, he slithered out of even the profile she had pinned him with at that restaurant that had made him freeze and deflect. Persistence and caring were terrible, insidious tools, and he wielded them well. It wasn't as though she forgot, that he was a liar and a traitor and could not mean her well in the end, it was just that she'd acclimated to the idea. It was just that, as everything else around her began to dissolve, there he was, capricious and commanding as a creature from another world, setting a path out before of her, promising her protection if she would only follow him into the wild wood.

She was a grown thing though, unloving and unmoved, she would not be led as a child by the hand. (Oh but he had held her hand so sweetly that day, when her love for her husband had been overmastered by her doubt, even after, she could not forget that.) She would not blindly surrender to her gruesome fate, she would tear away the fine tissue of her ignorance and stare it down.

* * *

One of the photographs, buried in the middle of the stack, was an old polaroid, colour shifted with age, and small and curled. It was a snapshot taken in someone's back yard, with part of a blue house in the background, an unpainted picnic table in foreground. There was Sam, grinning for the camera, young and vibrant and alive. His arm slung around the shoulders of another young man, of a height, with short fluffy, lightish hair, who looked off to the side rather than at the camera, squinting slightly in the sun. Leaning against the legs of the man-who-was-not Sam was a small pixyish child, hardly out of toddlerhood, barefoot, wearing a tutu and brandishing a glittery gold wand like a sword, a wide, sly smile gracing her girlish face.

It took her a minute, to recognize him. At first she was ready to dismiss this man and this girl-child as strangers who passed out of Sam's life before she became a part of it. But there was some nagging thing about shape of his nose, his chin, the line of his shoulders where they hunched just slightly under the weight of Sam's arm. It was the early or mid eighties, she guessed by the clothes, not so long before she would be Sam's daughter. And there was her father, standing beside an impossibly young and boyish Raymond Reddington.

She stared at the picture for a long, long time, sitting crosslegged on the floor in the midst of the mess she'd made of the partially unpacked cartons. Her father's young face and Red's even younger one, both of them hale and strong and somehow terrifically vulnerable - and lost to her, separated by a great wasteland of time. The image was too small to give her much real information, their faces so small she could eclipse them with her thumb. All of the horrors that were to come had yet to visit them when this picture was taken, she could tell that even if she didn't quite know what those horrors were.

Young Red looked boyish, fine featured, supple and vibrant and lovely the way some young men are. Of course, she thought, of course, no wonder he had such meteoric success on both sides of the law, and at such an age, people want to give you things when you look like that. But this pretty creature was not the man she knew. Time would strengthen him, give him power, and grief, make him into a force of nature as much as a man.

And the girl, she thought, what would become of the girl?

She put the picture back into the middle of the stack, tucked the lot back into the box, and locked it back up tight. She worked the little key off the ring, and this took some time because her fingers were clumsy with lack of sleep, and tucked it into the pocket of her sweatshirt. It wasn't as though hiding the key would stop anyone interested from picking the lock, it was just a sign of old habits kicking in.


	2. according to the hoarding of these clues

**_Author's Note:_**I do apologize for the wait on this one, a combination of work, technological issues and sheer exhaustion kept me unable to work for a while, but I'm back with it now - and have a fairly definite plan for this. Realistically it will be about 5/6 chapters rather than the 3 I originally thought and progressively more canon divergent from here on out. One of the big things that put me off working on this for a while were certain revelations in the finale, and after much thought I've decided to stick to my original plan. With greatest thanks to my sanity saving beta and sounding board, Alicemorganss(harrietspecterwrites)

* * *

**_Summery:_** _The machinery of the world is unrelenting, and a small discovery leads to a larger one._

* * *

_While back in the world that moves, often, according to _

_the hoarding of these clues, _

_- Only Skin, Joanna Newsom_

At times it seemed as though her life moved according to certain prohibitions on _looking_, as though she is in some strange and senseless fairytale. She wonders sometimes if she is the girl from the winter wood who must not hold the candle up to see the face of the Bear Who Was A Prince, or if she is the cursed and displaced Melusina, who grants power and love but gives birth to monsterous things and must not be observed while bathing - and she knows that one day, as was always meant to happen, the prohibition will be broken and the promised doom with come for them all.

When she was a child, transplanted into her new life and raw with it, she came to realize that there were memories that had to be banished, and she learned to turn her face away. They still played out for a time, in her dreams. She remembered awaking in the blackest part of night, sitting in the middle of her bed and crying and crying, until her father would come. She could never explain, she didn't have words, in the waking world, for what she saw and felt in that dream place. She grew out of it, though, and passed them off as the nightmares of any small child.

And then, later there was her father's business, that was not his business, or not at all what it seemed, and she must not question, never press too closely into what went on. After all he was just her father, at home, ordinary as anyone. By the time she was allowed in, let in on the secret, she was already almost on her way out the door to start her own independent life.

By the time Tom came along, she knew too well how to avoid seeing the whole of what she faced, how to see only out of the corner of her eye and not confront what it _meant. _She didn't even realize, by then, that she lived this way, saw this way. She had forgotten how to lift her head and see what had engulfed her.

* * *

She spent a lot a lot of time in the the spare room with the boxes after that, going through the files, and the records of her father's finances, sorting them into some semblance of order. It's rough system at best, piles of papers on the floor, things that were important, things to look into, things to store, things to make note of and shred. It was unsettling, seeing the truth of her father's business this way. She had known already, of course. She had helped out, at times, when he allowed it, when he realized she had a certain knack. But somehow he had still kept her in the dark about the scope of his endeavours. He and Vic had been getting up to much more for much longer than she had realized. It was hard to make herself process it all, she found over and over that she was skimming, hurrying through it all and not actually taking much in. It took her an embarrassingly long time to realize that she was searching for Red's hand in all this. She was sure it was there. She wasn't sure what good it would do if she found the signs, but she knew they were there. It was like searching for the earliest signs of some creeping disease.

It kept her busy every night the first week of her "leave" and Tom let her be, only appearing from time to time to peer down at her from the doorway as he came by to tell her dinner was there if she wanted it, or when he was on his way to get ready for bed.

"I thought you said the estate was all squared away," he said one night, arms crossed over his chest as he leaned on the doorjam. He couldn't come farther into the room and easily avoid stepping on the papers and files laid out over the floor in broad arcs, and then ranks and columns.

"Well, it turns out it wasn't. There's just a lot to go through. I think I'm almost done, though," she stretched and looked blandly up at her husband with a smile that felt like a wince.

"Okay. Well don't stay up too late with all this. I didn't even feel you come to bed yesterday." he gave her what she was beginning to think of as his Concerned Husband Smile and retreated.

* * *

She had fallen asleep on the floor two nights running, when she'd laid down to try and stretch out her back. She'd woken early, feeling as sore and ragged as after their most arduous takedowns, to Hudson snuffling around her face, obviously worried about the strange behavior of his human. She felt bad about that, her marriage had begun to drag at her like some kind of evil harness and her work, the sense of purpose she'd always depended on, had turned strange and unstable, but these were human concerns, and Hudson was a steady creature who needed his routines.

She took the dog for a long walk that morning, needing the time and space and movement begin to work through everything she'd read. Yes, her father's business was different than even she'd been aware of. Yes, he'd had contact with Reddington on and off for years. Yes, Reddington had almost certainly been the source of funds used to pay her school fees and college tuition. She wasn't sure what to think of it all, except it made her feel cold all over, it made it feel like her father was slipping away all over again, like he was turning into a stranger even in her memory, under the dark pall of Reddington's influence. But was that influence so very dark?

He'd been gone almost three weeks, and she'd still not let herself really remember the day of the incursion. During the investigation, she'd told her story over and over, but she'd spoken of it drily, from a distance, not letting any of it play out behind her eyes as she was interviewed. Not let herself revisit what had happened, really viscerally happened as she strode around in the dark, trying to take out enemy operatives and signal scramblers, as she had watched Red come out of that awful bloody box _for her, _with Luli's still-warm body lying on the ground between them, awful and lifeless, the bruising grip of Garrick's man hauling her along, and Garrick himself with his sagging face leering at her and what he had thought he'd seen between her and Red. She'd felt sick with terror but also strong, unbent, strangely clear and bright and alive as though someone had started a chemical reaction in her that lit her up, made her feel invulnerable, unstoppable. That had been _hers _and she wasn't going to let her interrogators anywhere near.

And she certainly hadn't let herself think about that terrible jolt she'd felt watching that woman with her scalpel and her finger in Red's neck, how wrapped round with horror she'd felt - and then how steadily her eyes had sought out his, how easy it had been to understand his silent instructions and act. Get herself out. It wasn't until she stood on the street, watching the ambulance speed away and feeling ragged and flung out by the momentum of the day, that she had realized how wholey and profoundly she was unwilling for that to be the last she ever saw of him. But it had been. So far it had been. There was just that one phone call keeping her from the creeping suspicion that he'd slipped away, mortally wounded into the dark, and she'd never been so glad to see the demise another human being as she was over that of Garrick. The small sting of satisfaction that Reddington had bested him in the end worried her almost more than anything. Perhaps she was becoming just as much a stranger as it seemed suddenly her father had been.

She walked and walked in the brisk and changeful morning air until her dog pulled at his leash, trying to lead them off the sidewalk, and she found she'd taken them to the park without even realizing it. It was a bleak, overcast day, and there was no one much around so she sat on a bench alone and Hudson sat at her feet until the both of them were rested enough to make their way home. As hard as she'd tried she found that still none of it fitted neatly or easily in her mind, she only knew that she was on the verge of something, that some awful realization was bearing down on her and was bringing on some tectonic shift and she might be able to grasp it if only she could remember how to _look._

* * *

After a time she realized she'd gotten all that she could out of the files, so she packed them back away, and this in itself felt like passing through another threshold of distance. Her throat was scratchy and thick with dust and the smell of damp that lingered and the obscure sense of ruthless self denial she feels as she makes good on her categories of Keep, Store, Destroy. Tom doesn't interfere, doesn't question her again, makes the passing assumption that her little project is wrapping up.

She wasn't doing any better at being able to fall asleep beside her husband. Tom had started to look at her strangely in the mornings when he finds her camped out in the livingroom, dozing on the couch, having fallen asleep watching old movies or episodes of M*A*S*H on Netflix, trying to pretend that she's still a normal woman, without a past and a present that were both twisting wildly out of shape. He's getting this distant, calculating look. Sometimes she sees it out of the corner of her eye as they amble around like strangers in their house.

* * *

One night she gave in against the prohibition she had set upon herself, against the needy tenor of her curiousity. Long after husband and dog were both asleep, she went straight for the long metal box, armed with the little key, and pulled out the stack of pictures again. She looked at all of them this time, closely and carefully. Most of them are of Sam, Sam and Judy when they were teenagers, Sam and Maggie, the woman he almost married before he became a dad and moved away from Chicago. A couple of her, as a little girl in the house in the Chicago suburbs that she didn't really remember, wearing that bobbed haircut and those heavy straight bangs, smiling up the camera and clutching a tatty, floppy teddy bear. One of her dressed up for Halloween with Nick and little Amy, that first year in Nebraska, and she _did _remember that, her little cowboy sheriff costume with the little red cowboy hat that she and Nick fought over for months afterwards. Her cousins, she supposed, weren't and couldn't have been caught up in any of this. They, at least, had to be pretty much who she thought they were. It was she who was the changeling child, the wild, alien thing dropped into their midst, strange and fierce and soulful. She had never suited them terribly well, and she had never quite understood them.

She came again to the picture of Sam and Red and the girl. It was the only one with him, she was sure of that. The familiarity seemed obvious, and not at all begrudging. So they were friends. So Red hadn't pushed his way into Sam's life like a destructive force the way he had in hers. It only seemed more and more obvious that her father could not have been blameless and separate in this association.

It was with that same claustrophobic wrench she's felt so many times lately she knew she'd done wrong to never ask her father so many things. It was all left too late, even the most important things, and even regret so fierce it froze her skin wouldn't change that.

It was strange, but in the weeks since Sam's death, memories of her childhood had walked abroad in her, as she dreamt, as she sat in thought, like they never had before. It was like some door had opened or a latch loosed, and she who had never been one to dwell except on the facts and figures she need for her work, was filled all up with bruising nostalgia. A sense that she had somehow blundered through years and years as blind and unaware as a child, that for all her education, the unforgiving nature of her job, day to day experiences with human rankness, there had been nothing much to wake her into her own skin and make her see the reality of her own surroundings.

Now her awareness was limned with a terrible clarity, the details of her quietest days seemed to impress themselves on her, her familiar house, the dim, faintly green light in the corner store - even the lines of Tom's face stood out to her, as though suddenly new and unknown. She'd heard of this, of course; she knew that grief did strange things to the brain, but she hadn't understood what it would feel like to live inside it, with all her senses abraded and raw and the monstrous, unmasked machinery of the world pulling on her. Even here in the her cloistered fastness behind her maze of boxes, it pulled her.

* * *

She took the picture from the stack, assigning only the most basic reasons why it fascinated her so, and tucked the others away again, fully satisfied they held no other revelations. The next day, realizing she shouldn't leave it in her bedside drawer, she slipped it instead into a file of old case notes she'd kept tucked away, in a box of other old files, in the back of the bedroom closet. It was here that something occurred to her, long delayed and awful, sending her stumbling for the support of the chest of drawers. She breathed slowly and carefully, reminding herself that Tom was out the way he always was at 10 am on a Tuesday, until she regained her footing.

She slid the files back into place and washed and dressed, her mind blank and numb and flinching from what she'd just discovered. She had to keep reminding herself there was no reason to keep checking over her shoulder. She collected Hudson's leash and called for him, her voice verging on frantic until he wandered over, calm and curious, from his big round cushion in the living room with his tail wagging. Liz shepherded them both out of the house and into the car with the sensation of something chasing, watching her her all the way, like an impossible fantasm, though she knew she was alone, that there was no real danger. It was just that now that she _knew, _that knowing spread backward in mind, all that time she has walked so unaware and unprotected spurred her forward now like a thing chased.

She wound up in the park, by the little pavilion where she had waited out Tom's interrogation, and Red had waited with her. Her dog whined and pulled at his leash, unsure why they were outside and not walking or playing, but Liz sat limp and immobile, clasping hard at Hudson's leash 'til her hands stiffened up and started to cramp around it and she finally moved enough to release the lock on the line to let him roam a little farther afield.

It had been important to her to get out of that house, and Hudson with her, and after a time he seemed to sense her distress, and came to force his head under her elbow and rest his chin on her knee, brown eyes confused and worried as they gazed up at her. She ran over it again in her mind and could find no new solution. The box she had pulled out from under the floorboards had been tucked into her box of old case notes, under all the folders, in a storage bin in the back of the closet with her old college stuff. There was absolutely no reason for Tom to be looking through all her things, unless he had discovered that the box wasn't in it's original hiding place, and why would he have looked for it in it's hiding place if it was planted and he didn't know it was there? Even if he had suspected her of having an affair, he might have checked her coats, her phone, her bag, things she used every day but it strained all credulity that he might go looking in things she hadn't touched in years, save for day she had stashed that damned box, when he was out at school. Supposedly. Was he ever really at school? He must be sometimes, she reasoned, she'd met some of his coworkers, she went to the little Holliday play the year before, not all of it could have been pure fabrication, could it?

She needed a plan. She needed to know if she was sure. She needed to talk to Red. The avenues open to her, he had said, well what did that even mean? She'd had to explain about being in communication with one of Red's contacts in the effort to find him, the FBI did know, in the vaguest sense, about Mr. Kaplan, and she assumed that Kaplan would have moved somewhere new and secret in deference of that fact, but she could think of no other recourse.

She called the hotel and asked for the right suite, for Mr. Kaplan, and the bland voice on the other end politely told her that no one by that name was currently in residence.

"Wait," she said, in desperation when the clerk went to hang up, "I think… he'll have left some way to get in touch, please, it's very important. My name is Elizabeth Keen, he might have a message for me."

"Hold on one moment," said the anonymous voice, "Yes, we do have a message for one Liz Keen, I'm afraid you will have to come and pick it up in person, though, we have strict instructions to check your ID."

Understandable precaution she supposed, "Alright, I'll come and pick it up."

* * *

The message was brief, just another hotel and another suite number, so she sat in car and made the call, not quite willing to present herself at Mr. Kaplan's door, unsure of her welcome, unsure of how desperate she wanted to seem to get in touch with Red.

She had some idea, if she really thought about it, what it was he was up to. He was hunting. When the way is clear, he had said, and there was a mole in black site, there had to be a mole among his own organization as well, and he was hardly going to let them live with their guilt once he found them. She was sure that notion should chill her, make her fear him, but she was already chilled, she was already in fear, she had already let a man into her life and her bed who had blood on his hands, and all she could feel was rage that someone had let that vile man Garrick and his mercenaries into their midst, that her partner was going to be doing physical therapy for months, had nearly lost his leg, and that Luli Zheng, as little known as she'd been to Liz, had died crying in fear. Red had gone hunting, and that was all right with her. It's just that she couldn't think now, except to turn to him. It was just that he knew more than he'd said, and she'd refused to hear it, and now she needed to know, it was just that it now seemed that Sam had stood by him, so either he was a better man than he seemed or all three of them were much worse, much farther gone than she'd ever realized.

Her phone rang, an unlisted number on the screen. she answered.

"Hello, Dearie," said Mr. Kaplan, "I wondered when I was going to hear from you."

"I... was hoping you could," Liz began, and then stopped and began again. "I need to talk to Red. Do you know how to reach him?"

* * *

It wasn't hard in the end, to convince Kaplan to give up a number that would let her contact him. She had sounded almost fond, almost amused. "You are protected, Elizabeth," she'd said. "He wouldn't have it any other way, and neither would I," and she'd bid Liz to look after herself, that she would be reachable by the same contact information, "barring any outside interference."

When it came to the moment when she must make the call, she hesitated, sure she was about to set the implacable gears turning, put into motion, another awful string of events that once started would drag her on through 'til their unknown conclusion. This is what she'd felt, perhaps, looming over her for weeks and weeks. But the day was growing long, the weather was turning, the winter sun dimming down into late afternoon, and Tom would soon be wondering where she was. So she called him.

"Lizzy," he said and his voice sounded rusty, tight and flat and not the warm sound she was used to, "I didn't expect to hear from you while I was… away. Is there something I can help you with?"

"I know," she said, and found she was nearly whispering though she sat in the safety of her car, with only her dog sleeping in the back seat, "I know about Tom. He found the box."

"Yes, Lizzy, I remember. It was only a few months ago-"

"No," she cut in, her voiced strained, frantic, and suddenly as she said it, all of it was real, pressing on her, choking her, and she hated how she needed him to tell her what to do, she needed him to understand her immediately and show her that way out through the woods, "No, I mean I know he couldn't have found it, he should never have, unless he was looking for it. He must have been looking for it, Red. He was looking for it."

There were several long beats of silence, and she listened hard for any signs of movement or reaction down the line, she found she was once again curled in, slouching protectively around her phone, her tenuous connection to the next criminal in whom she was placing her trust, the man who had promised to lead her through the dark.

"I'm sorry," he said soft and low and there was the tone she knew, her tone, "I'm sorry this has happened to you and that you have discovered it now when I can't - the way is not clear, do you understand, Lizzy?"

"Yes," she said, and her voice wobbled precariously. Her vision whited out with tears. "But when will it be? It's been a month, how long can it possibly take?"

"Has something happened, Lizzy? Where are you?"

"In my car," she said, putting her hand out to the door panel and then her forehead as if to check that it was so, that she and the car were both still there, "Near Mr. Kaplan's old hotel."

"Have you done anything? Said anything to him?"

"No, I haven't even seen him since I figured it out. Do you suppose he ever really goes to that school in the day? No, it doesn't matter - What do I do, Red? You have to tell me what I do now?" And she was weeping now, she knew, and hoped he couldn't tell, her forehead pressed hard in her hand, because all of it a was wrong, all of it felt like her world dissolving around her again, and all of it was his fault, except all he'd done was open her eyes to what was there, and hadn't she wanted to remember how to _see?_ Only she had failed to anticipate how much it would feel like being pitched off the edge of the world.

"If you go to Kaplan, she can put you somewhere safe, if that's what you need, Lizzy. But I'm so sorry… I'm afraid I have to advise you to remain in place, at least for now. If you are sure he doesn't suspect you know. The truth is," he paused and gave a sigh, she could hear a hint of it over the line, "I'm not sure what his purpose is here, or rather, what his master's purpose is. He was put into place to show me they have access to you, but more than that…" he trailed off.

"Well then, what good are you?" she demanded, thinking _you were supposed to know all of it, you were supposed to tell me as soon as I showed I would ask. _She wished he was there so she could reach out and strike at him or rail at him but it wouldn't work at a distance, and besides she frozen inside at the thought that _he didn't know _ - that perhaps Red wasn't an omniscient force, for all that he'd done to prove himself knowing, and perhaps he wouldn't have had to try so hard to impress that on her if he really had been.

"There is no way for me to say how much… I regret that this happening to you," he said, and he wasn't supposed to sound so tender, so much like she was causing him pain, when she was well on her way to being furious with him. "I won't be gone much longer, I will come to you as soon as I am able, and it will be soon, I promise you. You can leave and be kept safe, and I won't fault you in the least, but we will have lost a chance to track down the hand that holds the leash. You can remain in place and _do nothing to give yourself away _and I will be back to help you investigate him. Or you can, I suppose, try again to try again to turn him in, but he was already cleared once, I'm not sure it will be any more effective this time. The choice is yours, Lizzy and no matter what you choose, there is nothing that will make me think any less of you."

So the decision fell to her, and maybe she was still in freefall, but she remembered that chemical light within that told her she was able, she remembered all the ways Tom had touched her and realized she had consented to wear a false name, and wearing that name walked into her training to become a Special Agent, had tried to become an agent for the side of good, and maybe that was why it had never quite taken. She wasn't going to let him, and his flat eyes and his accommodating smile slip back into the woodwork just because she didn't have the stomach to wait for his inevitable mistake, the thing that gave him away once and for all. Or his head on a platter, whichever came first

"What if I shot him," she said, and didn't recognize her voice at all, it was hard and dry and past all tears, and she knew the instant she'd said it that she wasn't ruling it out.

"You could do that," he said and he sounded speculative, maybe almost like he approved, or maybe like he disapproved, she has having a hard time hearing over the sound of rushing blood in her ears, "If you do, call Mr. Kaplan again, she's a miracle worker."

"You want the man that holds the leash," she said.

"Yes."

"You think this unknown person is a threat to you?"

"Yes. To both of us, since obviously he knows you are… important to me."

"Well." She took a deep breath that was almost a gasp, her hand against her clavicle to steady her pounding bird-heart that was ready to take flight, knowing she had already decided but just needing to say the words, "I'm going to stay put. I'm going to wait it out. And you're going to come back soon. And then you're going to tell me everything you know."


	3. we are restless things

_**Author's Note:**_I don't think I've ever updated something this quickly in my life, but I wanted to be sure I got a little farther before Work Project gets ahold of me in again. Chapter is unbeta'd so please forgive any mistakes I have missed. I was impatient to get this up here. This chapter is for my dear Alicemorganss/eliizabethkeen. Apologies for a continuing lack of Red, but I assure you he will be back very soon, you need only wait until the next chapter is posted.

**Summary: **Liz lives with her reality. Liz remembers. Suitable reinforcements are called.

* * *

_Press on me, _

_we are restless things. _

_Webs of seaweed are swaddling. _

_You call upon the dusk of the _

_musk of a squid: _

_shot full of ink, until you sink into your crib. _

_-Only Skin, Joanna Newsom_

The first night after she knew was the hardest. It was nearly impossible to act naturally around Tom, even more so because she hadn't been acting naturally around him for weeks now, and to suddenly bounce back in an attempt to seem like her old self would be even more obviously out of the ordinary.

He was already home from school when she and Hudson walked in. It had taken her a good ten minutes to become willing to get out of the car and walk into her own home, trying to find some calm and peaceable face to put on. She kept her face turned down as she came in because it would be obvious if he looked that she had been crying, but then she realized she'd had more than one reason for tears lately. Hudson stuck close to her side even after she unhooked his leash, practically leaning against her legs, in solidarity perhaps, or feeling the new and sickening level of tension.

"I wondered where you guys were, you didn't leave a note or anything," said Tom as she put away her coat.

"Sorry, I," she stopped, not sure what direction to take, "It was kind of a whim, I guess. We had a really long walk in the park. He hasn't been getting enough exercise lately and I'll be back at work soon."

"Okay, I was worried, that's all," he said and he really did have that little worried frown between his eyebrows, she would have believed him if she hadn't known, she would have apologized again, promised to let him know just where she was… it chilled her right through with a thrill like mortal fear and she took an involuntary half-step backwards that she disguised behind a move to reach for Hudson's collar and guide him into the kitchen for food and water.

"I wasn't sure what you wanted to do for dinner, I was thinking maybe Thai?" he called after her, in his usual unruffled middle-class californian drawl, and she wondered, _is he such a good actor or does he really feel that secure here? Does he really think he has me, unquestioning and willing? _

* * *

She had almost finished with the boxes of her father's things and that wouldn't be an excuse for much longer. As tempted as she was to draw out her project it occurred to her she should get it all packed up and announce she was taking it out to a storage unit, maybe with some of her old things to add veracity. If Tom really wasn't what he seemed, and now she felt sure of that, even if it was flimsy proof at best in the eyes of the law, then she didn't want him to have access to some of the things in her father's files. Certain things she knew she must investigate but that shouldn't be known outside of the family.

She tried to settle in with her laptop and the stack of things she'd meant to look into further, but her heart was still beating too fast and her mind wandered easily, none of it could hold her interest and she looked around at the careful order she'd made of all this information, all these papers, as though all of it was foreign and unconnected to her. There was the impulse under her skin, like a small persuasive whisper, to get out, to run, to wait till Tom slept and fill up her car with all it could fit and take her dog and go. Not just go, but go to Red, she was willing to acknowledge that now, to herself, even if she would recant later when her head was clear. She could hand herself over to the brusque care of Mr. Kaplan as his proxy, and let whatever happened next happen out of her sight while she stood under the hand of his protection. But she was unwilling to go back on her word and more than that, Tom was her mistake and she was unwilling to leave him for someone else to clean up, it was just the scope of what she'd agreed to sinking in.

* * *

In the end she gave in to the defensive impulse to put on a facade of normalcy. She got ready for bed and slid between the cool sheets on her side of the mattress for the first time in days, staring up at the ceiling in the dark room, her husband a warm, drowsy weight only slightly more than a foot distant from her. He was still human after all, and could not suspect, and he still smelled like soap and toothpaste as he got into bed for the night.

"Project finished then?" he asked quietly without turning, settled in on his side facing away from her, like usual.

"Yep. Almost anyway," she said. Her voice was nearly normal, no more strained than it might be if she were merely tired.

Tom slept easily, though not quietly, he often moved and twitched as though beset by active, prodding dreams, but she had always been amazed by the way he was never stricken with insomnia they way she was from time to time. She lay stiff and still, trying not to tighten all her muscles against the soft bed and wondered abstractedly about the incongruity of a man who led a double life yet rested easily every night. It didn't trouble him, she supposed, it must not prick is conscience if he had showed no strain, no regret or edginess even after almost three years together. He hadn't even suffered nightmares after Zamani's attack, and she realized that in itself should have been a warning sign.

With time she fell into a light doze, and then a blank kind of deeper sleep on the edge of awareness that kept her until Tom's alarm went off and he got up, and she turned on her side and shuffled under the covers like a child hiding from the dark and he left her be. She listened, heart beating so hard her fingertips tingled, for the front door to close behind him half an hour later, and found that once she knew she was alone, she was too exhausted to carry out her plans, too limp even to venture out from under the covers. Liz gave in and slept, and dreamed.

* * *

A man and a woman and a small girl child were in a car. They were driving a very long way and had been driving for a very long time. The girl was quiet, and tearful at times but did not actually cry. She sat in the woman's lap because there was no booster seat for her. Sometimes she climbed into the back seat and stretched out on the cool black velour and slept. The man and the woman talked sometimes but not often, quietly, and the radio was on all the time, very low, not music but voices, the news.

The woman had long dark, glossy hair in a messy ponytail and smelled faintly of a rich, peachy perfume that felt like home to the girl, like being safe and loved. She would be looking for that scent without realizing it for years and years as a grown woman, would find herself near to tears once in a while in a department store, a bakery, without ever knowing why.

One time she woke from a nap on the back seat and she had a headache and she was just so tired of being in the car, cranky, kicking at the dashboard softly with her sneakered toe, and even the woman, her mother, singing their song didn't relieve the boredom, and the man behind the wheel looked over at them, speculative, and then smiled and took the next exit. They ended up at a rest stop that's almost like a park, with a grassy area and a picnic table and a low cement building of restrooms and even though it was very, very cold, it's dry and the girl was happy to amble around the little park and feel the fresh breeze on her face and sit on the picnic table facing her mother and the man with the sharp gaze and the turned up coat collar.

There was a little restaurant that looked like a pretend log cabin inside, and they went there and sat in a squashy booth meant to fit a lot of people and the girl was given crayons and a color in menu and allowed to have hot chocolate with her grilled cheese sandwich and her mother said she didn't have to eat the crusts as long as the crusts were smaller than two inches, because that wasn't _all _crust was it? Her mother and the man talked cryptically for a while and when the girl got bored she climbed under the table and up between them with her coloring and got the man to help her with the maze, and he was awkward with her, like he was just as wary of her as she had been of him, and when they all got back to the car, she realized that she'd left Best Bear in the back seat and hadn't even noticed.

But all of them knew the trip was almost over, and her mother got quieter and quieter and started holding her tighter on her lap until the girl protested that it was uncomfortable, and her grip loosened a little. Her mother sang their song again, although her voice sounded a little hoarse and the girl leaned against her, tucked into her neck in the heavy, boneless way of children, her hard little skull and her downy soft hair and her warm breath against her mother's shoulder.

* * *

She woke sometime later, as the afternoon began with a weak pearly winter sun glowing in the uncurtained window, and for that long but infinitesimal rising time as she moved out of the morass of sleep to solid ground, she wondered if perhaps the previous day's revelations were a dream, or somehow a mistake and were now surely erased. But she opened her eyes and she knew it was all still true. There was no way out and no way around, and the Bureau wasn't going to stand behind her, not without more than her own fish-cold, squirming certainty.

She had passed her first night as a woman as much in disguise as her husband, and she had survived it. It was strange the way, now that she was solid and rested and letting strategy gestate in the back of her mind, she felt a quickening inside, as though she had shucked an alien skin rather than donned one. She should have known, she supposed, that she was not the pleasant, golden girl of tolerance and love as in the more familiar tale, never could have been. No, she was after all the woman who hid a monstrous serpent within and when spied on by her prying, peering husband, she would swing round with rage, and bring flood and ruin down on him.

She still had a few hours left until Tom would be back, and lately he'd been coming back later and later, long after the elementary school would have been closed up. She couldn't count on that time though, she couldn't risk him coming home and surprising her, so she began with a search.

* * *

It was very hard to search a house without making it look like it had been ransacked, let alone searched, it was even harder when it was your own things, that were familiar and seen every day and seemed to go invisible no matter how closely you tried to observe. She started in the bedroom closet, perhaps because that was where the realization had come upon her, and went through Tom's drawers and clothes. She realized that he didn't have boxes of things from college the way she did, he didn't have childhood pictures in an album, in fact the most personal ephemera he stored was a shoebox of old CDs, and even they didn't look older than a few years.

She gave up. Searching the house would have to wait until she had the time to do it properly. He went on trips to conferences often enough, and trips for potential job interviews. She had never questioned it, had always been glad in a small, shameful way of the time to herself, the peace in the house with only Hudson to answer to. She had felt such guilt that she was always the one holding back, the one who'd had to try so hard to be open and loving, had to keep reminding herself how easy she'd felt with him at first, how good and patient he was. She had tried so hard to be deserving of that, of him.

He had often said how he shared so much with her and he wished she might share more in return. He'd brought out this lament more and more lately, with her work turning so secretive. Now that she know that must all have been an act, she began to see how he had been pushing, softly bullying, tallying and controlling her responses. He told her how much he worried for her, if only she would tell him what she was doing he might not spend so much time distracted every day expecting the call that she'd been hurt on the job. He told her he hardly saw her anymore, and wondered how that was going to work when they had a family. He reminded her how many hoops they'd already had to jump through to adopt like she'd wanted.

She had congratulated herself when they had gotten together, on finally finding someone to love who admired her and worried about her, who paid her care and attention, someone sensitive enough to be loving and giving and present when they started their family. She had tried to tell herself that it was only the novelty of it that made her feel caged and herded and watched, that this is what a real adult relationship _was._

But it seemed she was wrong after all, she _had _been watched, she _had _been catalogued and she still didn't know why, not really. She had been kept and made to feel beholden until she tied herself in smaller and smaller knots to make herself worthy. And Tom had deserved none of it. He had meant none of it. He hadn't loved and worried, he'd meant only to keep her back-footed and answering to him. The steady, deliberate insidiousness of it was finally becoming real to her, that what had to her had been a love affair, a marriage, a chance for family had been to him a strategy, a job. Now that she knew to look, she could see it, the painted set, forced perspective quality of their life together, the way the angles fitted together all wrong, and the set dressing shabby and unsentimental.

Although he'd been eager enough to have her, at first hadn't he, his hands careful and intent all over her, insatiable even, in the beginning. She was pretty enough, she knew, perhaps that was enough. Or perhaps he thought if he kept her physically satisfied she would love him more easily, perhaps he had looked at her life that had been lived largely alone and decided she must being going wanting, never understanding that her body didn't often crave, that she didn't have a reaching-out heart, that she lived often in the quiet egg of her mind, that smooth, round interior space she closely guarded.

She had the kind of face, sweet and a little bit solemn, that men often took as permission, as in invitation, to reach out to her, feel concern for her, express interest in her. It seemed to bring out a strange mix of paternal feelings and sexual interest in so many of the men around her, her teachers, her coworkers, her superiors. She could tell from the way they looked at her and spoke to her and leaned into her space, and tried to find ways to spend time with her, the way they had all felt she needed a bit of looking after. Malcolm had been that way until he'd become demanding, always needing more and more from her, and even Josh, aloof as he'd tried seem, had taken that patronizing tone with her when they were finally together to the point where it had seemed almost hectoring. She'd thought Tom was different, she'd thought they were beginning a life on equal footing. She'd been so willing to believe.

* * *

The second night passed more easily. Liz willingly took dinner with the man who pretended to be her husband, and got into bed beside him. She told him that her leave was almost up and she would be going back to work soon, though in truth she hadn't heard from Cooper in almost three weeks. She turned out the bedside lamp, and after some hours of holding very still and pretending to sleep, she promised herself that she would be safe until morning and slept in earnest.

The next stretch of days were filled with an immense yet casual tension, as she was by turns filled with a bottomless simmer of anger and then fleeting, almost hopeful horror that she had after all made a mistake, that she couldn't really suspect of all these terrible things, she couldn't really be suspecting that Tom had at least one murder on his hands because that was the stuff of bad cinema. And she wondered, often, what _soon_ meant, if he had meant it all, if he was going to make her sit and wait for as long as he could to punish her for her disbelief. But he wouldn't do that, she had sense enough to know that. Her real certainties didn't change, and they were simple facts. Tom was an imposter. Red would do what it took to keep her safe. That was enough for now.

* * *

Sense struck her, early one morning, after she'd again given up on sleeping in her own bed again, and instead camped out on the couch in spite of the way Tom questioned her about it in the morning. Once she had the house to herself, she called Kaplan and explained her predicament in brief, detached terms, and the woman promised to be there within the hour. She descended on the house with team of five people who were entirely unknown to Liz, they were not the same people she had seen the day of the Garrick Incursion. They carried bags of equipment and eyed Liz with curiosity but didn't speak to her.

"You know what to do," Kaplan told them sharply, "You've got until four so I suggest you get to it."

Liz wanted more than anything to ask Kaplan if she really trusted these people, but such an insult seemed terribly ungrateful. Hudson snuffled around the legs of the interlopers as they began to move methodically around the house with their cameras, until Kaplan caught his attention and he turned into putty in her hands for ear scratches. It was reassuring to see Kaplan reduced to muttering sweet doggy nothings just like a normal person.

"Can I offer you some coffee? Or tea, or something?" asked Liz, feeling absurd and uncertain in her own kitchen, with Auntie J's firm reminders about courtesy kicking in automatically. Kaplan smiled faintly up at her, eyebrow at a wry angle and Liz shrugged, embarrassed. "Well I don't really know the etiquette for when you have people in to search your place," she said.

"Why don't we three take a walk. Most people find they don't really care to observe this. It's rather like dentistry, necessary, tedious, and rather grotesque. Surely this fellow would appreciate the exercise," she reached down patted Hudson's head, and sure enough, he had perked up at the word "walk" just like it was an average sort of day.

* * *

She had met Tom not long after things had fallen completely apart with Josh. Not long by her standards, anyway, months had passed, the better part of a year, but she was still smarting with it, with how badly her ambition had sat with Josh and how little he was willing to give up in return. They had started out as such friends, and it was a slow but inevitable slide into having an affair, and Liz would later chastise herself for how much hope she'd felt. The relationship itself lasted almost no time at all compared to the amount of time it had taken them to ease into it, and then for Liz to recover afterward. Josh had been there for her, from a distance, as her father went through cancer treatments the first time, and she'd been trapped thousands of miles away by work and studies and limited funds. For a very brief time when she was with him, she was deliriously happy. Then for a slightly longer time she'd been miserable but determined to preserve what had been so long in coming, what had finally been gained. The she found that she was pregnant, or rather thought she was for one week of terror and immeasurable longing, when she'd realized that she wanted children desperately, in spite of all the impossible complications of her work, her career. She also realized that she could never have that family with Josh, not with the way they picked and picked at each other until she felt raw and harried and confused.

Back then, though, she had thought she'd made it. That she'd started a real life in the real world, that the strangeness of her early days could no longer touch her. She thought she'd made a clean break. Even the breakup of a relationship could be put down to normalcy and pettiness, not the dissolution of the reality she'd built around herself.

Tom was introduced to her at a small party she'd been dragged to, as a boyfriend's friend, and he'd been unattached and lovely and persistent, and none of his coaxing seemed to hide a jeer inside. He was a school teacher. He was from California. He was soft spoken and and considerate and was willing to go jogging with her early in the morning. She should have known, she supposed, that such an uncomplicated surface could only have been a disguise, it had to be if he'd shown up in her life.

* * *

So she and Kaplan and Hudson went out while the team documented everything, took everything apart, documented what they found, and put it back together again. She was happy enough to miss seeing the process carried out in front of her.

It was a strange walk with Kaplan, to be doing such an ordinary thing with someone she'd met for the first time under such outrageous circumstances. For the most part they kept silent, Liz glanced frequently over at her companion out of the corner of her eye but she didn't catch the woman glancing back in turn, her inscrutable companion seemed to be focused out on the world around them. Hudson trotten between them, oblivious and happy. He always seemed to like the people Red brought into her life, she always wondered whether or not to trust his judgement.

It was a chill, damp day and Kaplan sent her over to the coffee cart when they got to the park, taking Hudson's leash in her hand, and patting Elizabeth's elbow lightly.

"I take coffee with milk," she said, "And be sure to get something with plenty of sugar for yourself, dearie. Stress runs through fuel like anything."

The radio was on at the coffee cart, and it was playing Christmas carols. She'd entirely forgotten, but it was only two short weeks until the holiday. Tom hadn't even mentioned it, hadn't even suggested they get a tree. It was like he'd suddenly stopped trying to play along in the charade, and she supposed that should make her nervous, but it seemed she had no nerves to spare. Whether or not Red was back by then, she was resolved she would not put herself through Christmas with her imposter husband. It was bad enough that it was the first one without Sam, this would be more than she could stand, this would break her.

"When do you think he will be back," was the first thing she asked Kaplan when she sat beside her on the bench, and she supposed she was to be congratulated on holding out that long, although that wasn't what she'd planned to say. She handed over Kaplan's paper cup of coffee.

"You're a canny girl. You've guessed what he's up to, I think?"

"I have an idea, yes."

"Then you know you can't put a timeline on it, it will take what time it will take. But I know he is close to catching up to… the root of the problem." She fixed Liz with a skeptical, piercing gaze that reminded her of the assessing looks her father would give her when he was sure she and Nick had been up to some mischief but didn't yet know what, piercing and calculating. Liz tried not to squirm.

"He may not come to you right away, the very moment he is finished," Kaplan warned, "He does what he needs to ensure his organization is sound, but he doesn't enjoy these… projects. Especially if they become personal. It is sickening work. He may not want you to see him… the way he is when he gets back."

"I hardly want him to see me in this state either, but we don't get to worry about that anymore, not with the way things are. I won't stay in place indefinitely. I won't spend Christmas in that house, with that man."

"I understand, dearie. I agree with you completely. And I believe things will move along more quickly than you think, now that we've begun. I'm glad you called me, now we can put contingencies in place."

* * *

She didn't prefer to think of Red as sickened by the grim facts of the life he lead, she thought of him often as an inhuman force, something imperturbable, something to rail against. If he felt what he did and did it anyway, what did that make him? Perhaps not a monstrous thing, a cold, unshakeable creature, but why then did he continue at all? Persisting on like a general in a war, an invisible war, a war below ground, for which he has given up everything. Why not just stop, why not just take his vast funds and go and be no more moved to violence and be no more sickened by it. What responsibility held him in this endless, horrible campaign?

He was not a man possessed of a mania, the way so many of the people on his list were. He was careful and he was unforgiving and she knew he harboured a deep vein of rage, but she was no longer willing to believe he was a man out for his own power and glory. They caught greedy men, eventually, and Red had never been caught. No, he had walked through the front door, purposeful and docile, for all that she had never doubted he could easily turn and snap and tear and burn them all. If given sufficient reason, he could make it happen, he might not even have to raise a hand but he could. And he hadn't. And wouldn't, he didn't destroy without reason. And he looked at her sometimes with such tenderness, such gravity, no man with a pathological mind and a berserker heart could look at her that way.

If she asked him, when he returned, about any of this, she could picture the blankness he would show her, the deflection. So many things he would not answer, though she'd begun to see after the investigation into the inclusion, it had something to do with what she would likely be asked in turn. Everything she had known had only made her interviewers look at her with harder, more suspicious eyes. She was beginning to see that if she wanted better answers she would have to trick him or force his hand, or find them for herself. And all of it was going to be a moot point if he _didn't come back._

* * *

The team was packing up when they walked back through her front door, and the house looked untouched, just as well decorated and impersonal as it always had been. They met in the kitchen and debriefed. She was handed a flash drive of pictures from their search, a copy of a key that had been hidden in the base of a lamp and another that had been balanced on the trim over the little-used side door. He was careful, there wasn't much to be found around the house, and Kaplan's team had already been through the month before getting rid of the surveillance devices put in place by the unknown faction across the street. She'd been so relieved at the time and now she wished she'd known, might have kept them after all, they might have caught Tom doing… something. But they wouldn't have, it wasn't as though his persona included a physical mask to put on and off, and what ever vile things he did, he didn't do them within the walls of the home he kept for his cover.

She did learn that Kaplan's team, in the course of their investigation, had come into possession of that house across the way, and they were putting people in place over there to keep eyes on Tom. If he hadn't noticed one batch of spies in the neighborhood, it seemed like little risk to bring in their own. She couldn't help but picture, at hearing this, the building of a web, a slow moving, near invisible thing of strings and menace with Kaplan presiding over it, a very suitable Arachne. Many women built a web to snare a husband, but most intended to keep them, not to expose them and destroy them and banish them the way she meant to now.

Kaplan patted her arm again and sent the team away out the back. "You know what to do if things take a turn," she said, "I trust you will keep me informed."

Then Liz was left alone again in her house, with the feeling like some subtle engine had come to life within her and around her, like finally she was underway.


End file.
